The Lonely Sickness

A WILLIAM MARCH OMNIBUS, with an Introduction by Alistair Cooke (397 pp.)--Rinehart ($4).

Company K was a sardonic minor masterpiece of World War I--a painful punishment drill in the doorless barracks of total recall. Its author, William March, died two years ago at 60. almost unregarded--before his Bad Seed, a tale designed to prove that even children may have murder in their hearts, became a bestseller and a Broadway hit. Now TV's Alistair Cooke, U.S. correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, with a governess' concern to see that U.S. cultural toddlers are cozily wrapped, undertakes the task of explaining March to American readers. Cooke makes a sound observation: March "is wholly free from the characteristics of contemporary American fiction that have come to be fashionable: from the tough monosyllabic narrative style; from the vaguely liberal humanitarianism . . . the self-conscious regionalism.''

The Lurid Moment. This omnibus is welcome if only for the reissue of Company K, which belongs in trench literature with Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and John Dos Passes' Three Soldiers. When it was published (1933), one critic called it a sort of Spoon River Anthology of the war. The form was the same, in the sense that each character spoke with his own voice to compose a harsh recitative for a community. But March's community was made up of the doomed dogfaces of Soissons and Belleau Wood, rather than the villagers of Edgar Lee Masters' peaceful U.S. hinterland.

Company K observes all the antiheroic conventions of the between-wars decades; yet Author March (full name: William Edward March Campbell) was himself a Marine Corps noncom.* wounded three times, who won a D.S.C., Navy Cross and Croix de Guerre, and had every right to the bitter pity with which he wrote his novel. Among its 113 characters, every military type is represented--the good soldier, the coward, the goldbrick, the rank-happy shavetail, the lucky and the wound-prone. Each is caught in one lurid moment of his life, as if March had composed by the light of a Very pistol.

In this story of "war as mean as poor-farm soup." one character suffers a case of hysterical blindness. This too befell William March, though not until years after the war. It was after he recovered that he wrote Company K, and he never entirely lost what Cooke calls the "lonely sickness"--his obsession with the "pathology of the normal" and the dark patches in the human landscape.

The Rictus of Terror. In the decade following World War I, Alabama-born William March became wealthy as a vice president of the Waterman Steamship Corp. After Company K's brief success, he left business for full-time writing, without getting any highbrow attention. His work, in addition to Company K, is well represented in this omnibus, with a short version of another novel, October Island, twelve fables and 21 short stories.

In the fables, March produced ironic little works in Aesop's ancient literary form. The best of the lot is called Aesop's Last Fable, in which the bemused peasantry, irritated at the fabulist's inability to give a straight answer to a straight question, throw him over a cliff. Here March seems to indicate his sad beliefs as to the function and fate of the writer who says unwelcome things. As for the short stories, many of them concern madness and abnormality, and are set in a shambling Southern town called Reedyville. They have the sincere hysteria of a man recounting an intolerable experience to indifferent ears. Although his work was something less than first-rate, no reader can fail to see the rictus of terror in the face of a harsh and ironic reality.

* And shipmate in the 5th Marines of Laurence (What Price Glory?) Stallings and John W. (Fix Bayonets) Thomason.

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